The wall, segregation, and sowings: recultivating an investigation of life in a territory of invisibi(civi)lizations

In order to nourish the soil of the master’s research with other perspectives, this article is an attempt to incorporate new references and re-elaborations to the investigation that was designed to map certain daily arrangements of the production of life, the dynamics of the territory and the forms of resistance to a structural project of precarization of existence from the encounters with some residents of a peripheral neighborhood of São Paulo/SP. To cover this theoretical/relational ground (human and extra-human) intended to be prepared and nurtured throughout the doctoral process, questions about the crossings and effects of the unequal coping with the covid-19 pandemic on marginalized social groups have been incorporated. Without claiming to provide definitive answers in this incipient resumption, the aim is to produce a kind of “compost-writing” with other possible perspectives, intersections and analyses. The bet is that the narrative-landscapes recalled from the experiences of encounters, which are brought to light here, give rise to “germinations” subject to a new problematizing intervention in the processes of invisibilization of certain existences − and the territorialities they inhabit – that paradoxically reveal the systematic acts of “walling” and concealing these geographic-existential territories.


Sowings
The production process in agriculture is made up of cycles that require a finely tuned composition of time, techniques and tools.Time, like a conductor, gives rhythm and cohesion: it signals the precise moment of planting, of carrying out the care methods (of the soil and of the plantation), of carrying out the harvest, and requires attention to the weather-climate -droughts and rains that will irrigate for the planting to take root.Another stage of this process implies a stoppage period, which ensures the land a necessary renewal phase.This pause consists of the interval of time that lies between the periods of the end of the harvest and the beginning of a new production cycle: the off-season (Russo, 2021).
In the off-season, in no-tillage systems, selected cover crops 1 are planted, which are laid on the soil surface, offering it protection.The cadence of the rotation of these plants cradles a very valuable movement, which deals with the gradual and slow incorporation of cover crops in the soil and the recycling of nutrients.At this rate, the decomposition product of the organic matter of these plants feeds microorganisms that, together with other processes, provide nutrients that not only protect and restructure the soil, but also provide, with recycled nutrients, the succession of cultures (Alvarenga et al., 2001) .
Now, but why describe, in this space, an agricultural production process?To which we reply: because it seemed possible to establish some proximity with the context in which this article is being produced: three years after the (formal) completion of the master's research (Santos, 2019) 2 .
This investigation was designed to map everyday arrangements for the production of life, dynamics of the territory and forms of resistance to a structural project of precarization of existences, based on meetings with some residents of the community of Jardim Piratininga (São Paulo/SP).Based on these approaches, it was possible to know about the other through themselves (Guimarães, 2001), beyond the perspective limited to the field of Health and the caricatural framing that supposes the peripheral scenes to be homogeneous.
The theoretical-methodological perspective that guided this research was the micropolitical analysis of everyday life, through the cartographic method (Deleuze;Guattari, 1995;Feuerwerker, 2014;Feuerwerker et al., 2016;Merhy;Feuerwerker, 2009;Merhy et al., 2016;Passos;Barros, 2012).In this article, we present fragments of narratives inspired by encounters with and in the territory, which seek to tell the unique stories of lives and the community, in an effort not to "flatten" them.
Therefore, this writing is located in the period of "research off-season", which comprises the completion (defense) of the dissertation and the preparation of a new cycle of discussion/ problematization.The production of this article, therefore, is a preliminary and slow attempt to incorporate new references, re-elaborations and sedimentations to previous research (possible paths of analysis) for covering the theoretical/relational ground (human and extra-human) that we intend to prepare, nurture and expand throughout the construction of the doctoral process.
In the meantime, much has been/is being experienced, perceived and collected as post-closure reverberations of the research: crossings and effects of an unequal coping with the covid-19 pandemic that broke out in Brazil in March 2020, and which has dragged on until the current times.Basting and sewing were carried out in a network3 of affective and material care that could accommodate some of the livingwhose bonds still persist -from Jardim Piratininga, a field that provided fertile ground for the germination of the master's research in question.There, as well as in the many slums, alleys, occupations, outskirts and streets of Brazilian metropolises, the pandemic experience was constituted as "an exacerbated chronic calamity" (Biehl, 2021).
Since the emergence of the health crisis, researchers around the world have been making great efforts to produce research that can guide the development of vaccines, prevention strategies, treatment and care practices, as well as to encourage analyses about the impacts and consequences of the pandemic in the most different ways of life and sociabilities.Thus, there is no doubt about the importance of producing studies regarding the formulation of measures aimed at reducing some of the socioeconomic, health and environmental inequalities that the pandemic has exacerbated.However, as relevant as it is to problematize discussion biases, conjunctural analyses and public policy-making that, sometimes, appear to be detached from the politics of existences, it is necessary to question the intervention strategies that disregard the multiplicity of what is conventional in naming populations and territories in vulnerable situations.
Inequalities, different realities and heterogeneous experiences in the ways of living-circulating-inhabiting the city require unique and non-homogeneous care actions and productions.In this sense, it is essential to monitor and map the uniqueness of the various contexts that make up diverse territories and existences.In the case of the pandemic, although the recommended measures are effective in what they are intended to do, which is, ultimately, to protect lives, we believe it is essential to broaden the reading of this event.Is all life, at any rate, capable of being defended and lived?Under what conditions and in what ways are some lives being produced?
Without intending to present definitive answers to these questions, even more so in this resumption of investigation, we intend to produce a kind of "compost-writing", which can nourish the soil of the master's research (Santos, 2019) with other possible perspectives, intersections and analyses, in a composition interspersed with study and intervention drifts and by past and present unrest.In this sense, the bet is that the narrative-landscapes recalled from encounters in Jardim Piratininga, which we bring up in this article, give rise to "germinations" subject to problematizing intervention in the processes of invisibilization.That is, the invisibilization of certain existences, and the territorialities they inhabit, and what paradoxically reveals the systematic acts of "walling up" and concealing these geographicexistential territories.
For all these reasons, it is important here to persevere in the production of encounters and in the monitoring of lives that are constantly framed in a process of social subjugation (BUTLER, 2015), of lives that are produced marginally, on the other side of the Wall.

From the Wall that "does away with us"
On a sunny morning in July 2019 -one of those when the incandescence of the Sun softens the icy breath of winter -, Maria, Jerônimo and I walked along the other side of the Wall of Jardim Piratininga.Wandering around the space, we stopped at a stretch of path that opened the way to another corner of the territory, with views of the polluted watercourse that runs at the back of the community.Carrying the remains of (in)organic matter, known as the Rio Negrinho, this canal is adjacent to the park that sparkles the landscape in green, forming a backyard.
We call it Rio Negrinho.But, in reality, it is a bypass channel on the left bank of the Tietê river, nicknamed the Negrinho river.(Gênio) Because it's like that, right?You fall there, you die.

It had to be channeled over there a long time ago, right? It cannot stay. […]
There are even highrisk housing… Over on the edge.People want to escape rent, right?Have you ever thought about living with that smell?(Pedrinho) I had not entered that area, hitherto inhabited by lives at constant risk: a composition of steep, funneled lanes that ended at the edge of that stream of murky waters and fetid odor, under houses on stilts.I remained for a few moments, looking attentively at a few children who were playing in the strip of dirt that separated them from the stream.Those small bodies seemed to defy danger, improvising a kind of dance whose movements slipped between contacts, imbalances and balances.We moved on.
Between passages through other corners and alleys, the slow conversation teemed with affections-memories awakened in the body of a late Jerônimo.And on the stops, on the occasion of fortuitous encounters with old friends, who, like him, had landed there a long time ago, a quick chat evoked memories, crossing threads of events that made possible the warp of the narrative web through which the story of that territory was recounted… The Jardim Piratininga ("dried fish" in Tupi-Guarani) bears in its name the trace of a village development, formed by five villages, which populated a portion of land where, currently, post-appropriation, the municipality of São Paulo is located.The waters of a still clear Tietê, between overflows and retreats, allowed a number of fish to escape, which, stranded, were left to dry in the river's floodplain, mobilizing the displacement of inhabitants attracted by the availability of plentiful food. 4he community, an indigenous toponym, occupies part of the vast territory of the eastern region of São Paulo.The settlement of this area, initially consisting of "many spaces, a lot of bush, several lakes", 5 took place through the overflow of (im)migratory flows that made a bunch of fish-people 6 disembark there.Housing occupations, landed over the lakes, scattered the people who, little by little, formed the landscape of that urban island.This, since then, has been populated by many "foreigners", from other lands or from the land itself, especially by those from the north and northeast regions of Brazil, but also by Haitians and inhabitants of some locations on the African continent, who would see in those lands a possible address.In the mix of bodies stuck in the new land, sediments of longing, memories, (dis)affections, of what was lived, of what was abandoned or, perhaps, of what impelled the desire to (dis)embark.
In this insular territory, the nomenclature of the streets and alleys is mixed with references that allude to biblical passages and characters and to popular icons of Brazilian music.Some streets also register in their names tributes to those who appeared in scenes of popular mobilizations and the creation of alliances necessary for the construction of an ethical-political project of life and housing, which aimed to intersect common realities, desires and needs.In that context, community leaders, residents' associations and some articulations with public administration bodies emerged (with demands for the supply of electricity, street paving and basic sanitation), land regularization processes, attempts to design and implement a Neighborhood Plan (Claro et al., 2019).
Even though it was not the first time that, together, we set out on a "wandering" through the community -through alleys, narrow or dead-end streets, single-story or vertical housing, through local commerce, through some fruit and vegetable stalls, through the little piece named vila dos mandioqueiros7 -, the landscape was never the same, or better saying, it did not seem to touch us in the same way as before.It was no different that day.
During the journey, the high Wall that surrounds Jardim Piratininga made Maria's eyes divert from the conversation − they went far, as if trying to reach the entire extension of that structure: "this wall that does away with us here… Prejudice.After building this line you see, the train that goes to Guarulhos, the walls went up a lot.We even fought not to raise the Wall, put a fence, so we wouldn't stay in the ghetto here" (Maria).
Maria continued to measure the discomfort that crosses her, which did not seem smaller than the size of the Wall, which rose as the construction of the train line and, later, the installation of the subway towards the airport progressed.For her, the Wall fulfilled other functions: to hide, to "ghettoize".Make it impossible to see the community for people passing by.Hide what you do not want to be seen.Hiding from the landscape that makes up the travellers' path, a certain arrangement of organizing everyday life and the unique lives that are produced in other ways (Santos, 2019 ).
The invisibilization of certain existences constitutes an act/effect of historical colonizing processes that, for decades, have been forging a simulacrum of an allegedly civilized world.In Brazil, the violent process of invasion by the colonizers, who imposed their (mono)culture and the racist conception of valuing the lives that mattered, while dehumanizing those that could be discarded/annihilated, engenders the manufacture/ maintenance of the permanent state of vulnerability to which some living beings are submitted, as well as the territories they inhabit.Therefore, the invisibilization goes through a process of "walling" (border delineation), engendered by the necropolitical project of making people die and let the dissident bodies die (Mbembe, 2018).
However, making something visible can imply a paradox.In the case of the populations that inhabit the peripheral regions of the metropolis, selective visibility is periodically established, which only reveals traces of "fireflying" lives, which flash "in the blinding brightness of the 'fierce' projectors: projectors from lookouts, from political shows" (Didi-Huberman, 2011, p. 30, emphasis added), statistics, dossiers, headlines on police pages that we sometimes follow with more or less attentive eyes.In this spectrum, the way of looking is reduced to the "eye retina" (Rolnik, 2007), obscuring the possibility of perception through the "sensitive eye".
Nevertheless, visibility per se does not guarantee the reversibility of the stratification of life in data.
Sometimes, not only does it make it impossible to see the world and perceive existential shades that color life, but it also dazzles due to the excess of spotlight/luminosity. Once saturated, the eyes see only silhouettes of lives, a flash that blurs existences.
Like a tear in the Wall, at the entrance to the Jardim Piratininga community there is a portal colored by graffiti, which turns the concrete structure into a frame through which it is possible to spy from the outside.What can be seen is a piece of the community and the daily coming and going of the people who live there or are passing through.
Parallel to the Wall, an extensive road through which bodies crumpled in motorized "coffin bearers" travel, towards the equally extensive work/study journeys and their daily commuting.Far from the places where they live, they trace with their own bodies the outline of an expressive map of the social, political and economic inequalities, produced by the spatial arrangement8 that configures the urban spaces of the metropolises.This map whose cartography gained extensive and notorious visibility when the health crisis emerged as a result of the global spread of covid-19.
In early 2020, SARS-CoV-2 arrived in Brazilian lands, a virus whose rapid spread propagated not only the contagion of bodies, but also the spread of terror, anguish and fear.On a daily basis, people from different corners of the world were vigilant in front of national and international news, mobilized by states of alert and constant tension, since the invisible enemy was on the prowl.Plots of a dystopian reality.
Among the people most affected by the virus were, at first, those who belong to more privileged social groups.However, it did not take long for the virus to spread among the vulnerable population.In Rio de Janeiro, a morbid statistic was inaugurated when the death of a black domestic worker was registered, who was infected in the residence of her "boss" (primeiro…, 2020).This event gave visibility to the historical inequalities under which certain social segments are subjected, in particular, black and poor women, people living in peripheral, suburban or homeless areas.
The context of the pandemic has exposed, on the one hand, the contradictions of race, class and gender in Brazilian society.The standard profile of deaths from covid-19 is the black man, with low education and belonging to the most precarious veins of the working class.However, the gender dimensions of the pandemic reserve a perverse place for black women, either because they are at the forefront of those services considered indispensable, such as nursing, cleaning, among others, or because of the effects of the accumulation of tasks placed on all women in confinement, aggravated by the precarious social conditions in which the black population finds itself.On the other hand, the pandemic also exposes the slave mentality of the Brazilian ruling class.[…] In the country of the friendliness ideology, the relations between the farmhouse and the slave quarters remain almost intact.The coronavirus pandemic does not stop millions of domestic workers from cramming into buses to serve friendly white people.(Faustino; Gonçalves, 2020, p. 283-284)

Segregations or on the fallacy of the democratic virus
Since the emergence of the health crisis, many studies have been following the impacts of the pandemic on urban experiences (mobility, work and socioeconomic relations) and on the lives of São Paulo residents.Among them, we highlight the "Coronavirus Special" (Coronavirus, [2020]), a set of analyses carried out by the Public Space and Right to the City Laboratory (LabCidade), a research and extension laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU/USP).In one of these studies, some health professionals were observed due to the high incidence of covid-19 in hospital settings, which resulted in the inclusion of these workers in the ranking of those most affected by the virus.However, the contagion and course of the disease did not occur in a homogeneous waytherefore, contrary to the mistaken idea that it was a democratic virus.
After dividing these professionals into groups of physicians and non-physicians -a division that already reveals the scale of professional hierarchization -, portraits of inequality and segregation that date back to the country's social dynamics were also shown.The study pointed out that a large number of health care providers resided in the "expanded center" of the city, the name for the areas considered most valued.On the other hand, non-medical professionals lived in the urban outskirts.Indeed, "the location of non-doctors' homes follows a similar logic to the distribution of the black and low-income population, who have been reported as groups disproportionately impacted by the pandemic" (Brito et al., 2020).
An expression of "anti-black racism" (Faustino; Gonçalves, 2020), the aforementioned population distribution reveals the perpetuation of an arrangement that structures society based on the construct of race, through which both localities (generally, the most precarious), and ways of living, transiting and occupying social spaces are defined.

The very historical process of urbanization in
São Paulo consecrated a model of racially and socially segregated city, distributed among dense suburbs and a few economic centers, where most of the jobs are concentrated.This unequal distribution between the place of residence and the place of work consolidates a pattern of commuting, concentrated at peak hours, which, added to an insufficient public transport network, produces overcrowding on buses, subways and trains on a daily basis, aggravating the risk of contagion.Staying away from agglomerations becomes a great challenge or even something inevitable for those who depend on these daily commutes.(Marino et al., 2020) Undoubtedly, the health crisis spread by the new coronavirus is a public health issue.However, throughout the pandemic -which extends to the present day in smaller proportions, except for the effectiveness of vaccination -, it became evident that the consequences triggered by the virus, whether due to the course of illness and death, or due to the different impacts that the same protective measure produces in different populations and territories, go beyond the health sphere, also implying important consequences in our ways of producing, working and socializing (Marino et al., 2020).
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended some precautions that were intended to protect the population and reduce the spread of the coronavirus.However, some of the recommended sanitary measures, such as social distancing, frequent hand hygiene (washing/ using alcohol gel), "staying at home", severely impacted economic arrangements, mobility and sociability relationships that structure and move the dynamics of urban scenes.
[…] the rapid advance of the pandemic, its popularization, reaching peripheries and slums, and the blackening of those affected is already taking place.It is important to remember that hygienistic actions have historically targeted such areas and people: removals, evictions and demolitions justified in the name of public health have been enshrined as the "way of dealing with the problem", instead of building solutions guided by the diversity of people and urban situations.(Marino et al., 2020, emphasis added) Hygienistic actions are not only configured through clearly perceptible acts, as in the cases of expropriations, removals and demolitions (the making people die).In the Brazilian experience of coping with the pandemic, hygienistic actions of a different nature were evidenced, such as those that aimed to induce the population to believe in a possible cure through the use of proven ineffective and harmful medications when used off-label.Or the action engendered by the "scientifically mistaken and ethically unacceptable" strategy (Ventura; Bueno, 2021) of spreading the coronavirus, which was deliberate and propagandized by the federal government, as a result of collective immunization by contagion, herd immunity.
Sharing a similar logic to that which guides the construct of free market regulation, the herd immunity thesis relies on the assumption that an epidemic is best overcome by leaving it unregulated.In effect, it reproduced the same constitutive violence of neoliberal paradigm, as it results in "violence against the weak and the poor: elderly and disabled people, homeless people, refugees and people with severe health conditions -many of whom are likely to also have a lower socio-economic status because of the correlation between poverty and illness."(FREY, 2020).It is, therefore, within the framework of neoliberalism, that certain government actions have been engendered, together with the structured project of market deregulation and privatization, to the detriment of state investment for the maintenance/creation of social security policies, subsuming lives to the profitability of the financial market .
While epidemiological neoliberalism (Frey, 2020) mobilizes in the sense of (supposedly) taking care of the lives of the population, through the control/overcoming of the pandemic, it also forges, in another spectrum, ways that allow the extermination of life, or rather, of "certain lives" (Butler, 2015;Mbembe, 2018).In the process of (under)valuing existences in which only "a few lives matter", certain groups are taken as culprits or potential threats, so that State intervention devices start to be evoked, authorized and justified.Therefore, the historical project of death under which life is subjugated is revealed.A project engendered by the exercises of both biopower (Foucault, 2002) and necropower (Mbembe, 2018) which, made possible by the technology of racism (racist State), legitimize and naturalize the annihilation of the other (original peoples and certain social groups), depriving them of humanity.
When the exercise of domination expands the colonial logic, crossing territorial borders and reaching every corner of the world, the exercise of power becomes governed by the colonial logic, not only about deciding who can live and who should die, but also turning the exercise of death into a form of political management (Almeida, 2019;Mbembe, 2018).Production of death to the detriment of sustaining life -a necropolitics -constituting strategies to incite risk, as well as government actions (Reis; Ventura, 2021) guided by several omissions (delay in acquiring vaccines and granting financial aid emergency, for example).
In another spectrum, depending on the perspective one looks at, certain practices, even those advocated by sanitary measures, however much they rely on the logic of care, in addition to not ensuring protection for certain living beings, can produce equally hygienistic effects once they are applied in a simplifying, decontextualized, homogenizing way, inattentive to the diversity that various territorialities and their living beings carry.
Food and housing insecurity; systematic intermittency in the water supply; and precarious or non-existent basic sanitation make it difficult, if not unfeasible, to comply with one of the main guidelines for preventing contagion: washing one's hands frequently.Tiny houses with little ventilation and which sometimes house large numbers of people, were challenged to remain in quarantine in case one (or more) household member is affected by covid-19.In addition, the digital divide hindering remote work and studies, as well as the lack of public restrooms, jeopardizing the personal hygiene care of homeless people.
Circulation restrictions implied reductions or financial losses for those engaged in informal work, in services considered non-essential.In Piratininga, the residents of the village of mandioqueiros, as well as the stallholders across the country, remained unable to work for months.Social distancing is utopia for those who, daily and compulsorily (health workers, cleaning sectors, transport, food and other essential services), squeeze into crowded means of transport, exposing themselves to the risk of contagion-illness-death given the overexposure to the virus.Now, in the face of all this, how can we collectively build ethical, political, social and vital engagements?How to elicit framings, segregations and stratifications, in order to "reveal the multiple forms that resist, reinvent themselves or even forge themselves by default and against the current of the hegemony of a market system, however democratic it may seem?" (Pelbart, 2013, p. 256).
Therefore, it should be noted that peripheral territorialities are not reduced to struggles, precariousness and shortages -perspectives under which they are usually framed.Denaturalizing the perspective of need is necessary, as it is not a defining condition of peripheral realities.Powerful solidarity arrangements9 produced in moments of great fragility, such as the pandemic, give clues about possible ways to create collective commitments of care and resistance.The production of community care for children and the elderly, book donations, articulations for assembling basic food baskets and personal hygiene kits for donation, as well as masks made by local seamstresses to be distributed free of charge are some of the many actions carried out in the peripheries of the country.Many of these actions continue to reinvent themselves.

Final considerations
The record of Muro written in capital letters throughout the text consisted of, by making use of this graphic resource, emphasizing the presence of symbolic (or not) border lines, whose traces signal political, geographic and subjective divisions.Lines that, by establishing zones of differentiation, establish the opposition between "us" and "them", as well as other dualisms that indicate what is inside-outside, what is superior-inferior, winnerloser, subject to life or to death.
The Wall bordered during the walk with Maria gives materiality to the social and racial segregation constitutive of the historical processes of formation of the big cities.In this sense, the high Wall that "conceals folks", which "ghettoizes", also makes visible the design of a segregated city, with more or less valued localities, more or less accessible, resulting from the unequal spatial distribution that concentrates in a few regions economic poles, jobs, goods and services (public and private) aimed at the population.
On the other hand, the densification in peripheral areas and the need for its inhabitants to face, on a daily basis, long journeys towards their work and/or study places.This disproportionality, in practice, poses barriers to accessing a wide range of rights, such as health, leisure, environmental sanitation, adequate housing, public services, work and urban mobility.
Traces of this inequality could also be followed throughout the health crisis triggered by covid-19, explaining that the forms of contagion and illness followed the same segregationist logic that engenders the country's social dynamics.After all, some of the factors that contributed to greater exposure to contagion risks were related to (precarious) housing conditions, mobility and income.The distinction between who could, in fact, enjoy the right to isolation and preventive measures highlights the structure of valuing lives that matter more and lives that matter less.The process of marginalization denounced by Maria was very evident in the pandemic.
For all this, outside the Wall, it is necessary to deconstruct the practices that operate in the logic of subjugation/guardianship of the other, considering the composition between diverse knowledge and territorialities as a condition of possibility for the creation of other worlds, which open paths for more creative, sustainable, collective, solidary and democratic living arrangements.A composition that cultivates modes of care production in which every life matters.This is an essential exercise in the field of public health, especially with regard to the historical assumptions that guide the production of practices and knowledge in this field, which can act as accomplices of regimes of oppression or consolidate health interventions as a presence of the State, so that hygienistic projects are enabled.
We believe that, both in agriculture and in the research field, what makes diversified production possible is the variation in cultivation, a composition with the different (species, references and existences).In this sense, it is necessary to produce research data that no longer homogenize or objectify territorialities and their living beings, but that can take them as active producers of knowledge about themselves and about the geographic-existential landscape where they live.Public policies can (and should) be produced in a shared way (composition with local knowledge) from the unique and diverse modes of existence, affective networks, collectivities and micropolitics of care germinated where life happens.An approach, therefore, with different perspectives of readings and experiences of worlds, in the sowing of some concepts and encounters with other ways of thinking-living-existing-resisting.